10 Fun Facts About Oxygen You Didn't Know

1. Who Discovered Oxygen?

Scheele (a Swedish Pomeranian and German pharmaceutical chemist) discovered oxygen (independently) but Joseph Priestley got the credit in 1774 because Scheele’s work was not published. But today, both Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley share the credit for the discovery of oxygen. Priestley discovered oxygen by experimenting with colourless gas by heating red mercuric oxide. He set up an experiment to test if plants can produce oxygen. 

When he put a burning candle in a closed container, all the oxygen in the container quickly extinguished the candle flame. Then he put the plant and relights the candle again, this time the flame continues. This showed that plants produce a gas that allows fuels to burn, and this gas is oxygen. Joseph Priestley continues the experiment, but this time Priestley put a mouse in the closed container first with the plant and the second experiment without the plant. The mouse died in the second experiment concluding that plants produce oxygen which is called photosynthesis.

2. How Much Oxygen Do We Consume?

A human inhale around 11,000 litres of air per day while consuming around 550 litres of oxygen from the air per day. When you breathe in the air, you’re breathing in 20% of oxygen and exhaling about 15 per cent of it. Every time a person inhales, 5% of it converts to carbon dioxide once they exhale.

3. Oxygen Can Be Harmful

Humans need oxygen to live, but too much can also hurt you because oxygen is an oxidant. When the body has an excess supply of oxygen, the body system breaks excess oxygen into a reactive negatively charged ion that can bind to iron; hydroxyl radical is created that can damage lipids in cell membranes. Luckily, the body maintains a supply of antioxidants to combat day-to-day oxidative stress.

4. Oxygen Is Everywhere

As a compound, oxygen can be found in water, plants, animals, and much of the solid material that makes up the earth. These compounds contain oxygen, along with carbon, hydrogen, and other elements. You can find it not just in our atmosphere but also in rocks, dirt, and even in the sun. The sun consists of 91.2% hydrogen, 8.7% helium, 0.043% carbon, and 0.078 oxygen.

5. Origin Of The Name “Oxygen”

Oxygen came from the Greek word Oxys and Genes or “Oxygenes”, which means “acid-forming” or “acid producer”. The average melting point of oxygen is -218°C, while the average boiling point is -189°C. Oxygen is a gas at room temperature.

6. Who Named Oxygen?

In 1775–80, French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, with remarkable insight, interpreted the role of oxygen in respiration as well as combustion, discarding the phlogiston theory, which had been accepted up to that time; he noted its tendency to form acids by combining with many different substances and accordingly named the element oxygen (oxygène) from the Greek words for “acid former.”

7. Oxygen Needed By A Fetus

A fetus does not breathe in the womb, the mother does it for the fetus. The oxygen needed by the fetus is passed through the umbilical cord. If the umbilical cord remains intact, the fetus will not be drowned in the womb. A human body weighing around 60 to 63 kg consumes 250 ml of oxygen per minute and the major organs that consume oxygen are the liver (20.4%), brain (18.4%), and heart (11.6%). Oxygen atoms make up an essential part of DNA and protein in the human body.

8. Water Temperature Differs From Oxygen

Warm water holds less oxygen than cold water because water molecules are closer together in cold water which makes it harder for oxygen molecules to get out. Also, oxygen dissolves harder in warm water than in cool water. Fish can take out oxygen from water in the ocean using their gills because water has a higher concentration of oxygen than the gills. When the water goes through the gills, the blood vessels in the gills absorb oxygen from the water.

9. People Buying Oxygen

Do you know? People now buy their portable oxygen for $13 a bottle. Most highly polluted areas and cities like China even have their own air/oxygen purifiers built-in at home. However, most of the citizens still find the air/oxygen purifier relatively expensive so they just wear a flu mask to minimise the bad effect of pollution on the human body.

Based on reports, customers have two options: “pure oxygen”, which contains 97% oxygen and a small number of other gases, or “fresh clean air”, which contains 78 per cent nitrogen, 21 per cent oxygen, and a small number of other gases. Mountain climbers carry oxygen because the human body does not have enough time to adapt to the lower oxygen levels and lower air pressure at higher altitudes. Remember, in higher altitudes, our body responds to increased breathing rates to boost the blood oxygen level.

10 Oxygen Used In Mars

Mars Oxygen or MOXIE is an experimental exploration technology by NASA to produce oxygen from Mars’ atmosphere in a process called solid oxide electrolysis. The primary objective is to produce molecular oxygen from the atmosphere of Mars and scientists will record the efficiency of the process. There are also plans to plant trees on Mars as well as the construct of a nuclear reactor.

Mars has oxygen, but it mostly has 94.9% carbon dioxide, 2.6% nitrogen, 1.9% argon and only 0.174% of oxygen.